Career Opportunities

By Jennifer Egan

Published: July 14, 2002

TWELVE

By Nick McDonell.

244 pp. New York:

Grove Press. $23.

THIS accomplished first novel by 18-year-old Nick McDonell is the latest entry in what has evolved into a subgenre of sorts: books by shockingly young people about the shocking lives of young people. The category, which reaches as far back as Rimbaud, also includes the recent and mediocre ''Crazy,'' a novel by a 16-year-old German boy that caused a sensation in Europe a couple of years back. But the towering icon of the genre remains Bret Easton Ellis's ''Less Than Zero,'' now 17 years old, a book with which ''Twelve'' has much in common and to which it owes an obvious debt.

Like Ellis's novel (which struck me on a recent rereading as far more nuanced than I gave it credit for in 1985), ''Twelve'' tracks the dissolute doings of rich kids returning home for the Christmas holidays, kids adrift on a sea of cash and boredom and parental neglect. Both novels consist of short present-tense scenes interspersed with italicized flashbacks. In the end they radically diverge; ''Less Than Zero'' presents a postmoral landscape of unstinting horror, whereas ''Twelve,'' despite a far higher body count, delivers a satirical, even playful portrait of a world that is perilous but essentially humane. It is a less original and far more likable work.

''Twelve'' traces the activities of a boy known as White Mike, who for reasons obscure even to himself has deferred his entry into college to remain in New York and deal drugs. His line of work brings him into contact with a network of characters whose separate stories ''Twelve'' follows in the days leading up to New Year's Eve, when the novel's plotlines converge at a single calamitous party.

McDonell brings an array of descriptive and dramatic skills to his task, and the resulting effort is taut and engaging, if finally rather slight. On the most basic level, he renders Manhattan's cosseted Upper East Side with both the casual authority of an insider and the wry distance of an observer. A description of Fifth Avenue: ''It was fall and the leaves were turning, and as they piled, the doormen dressed like midranking Soviet officers swept them into the gutter.'' When White Mike's cousin Charlie, short on cash, pawns one of his absent mother's necklaces to buy a first-class plane ticket to Florida, McDonell writes: ''In the end Charlie told his mother where the jewelry was, and she went and got it back, and they all wound up being investigated for insurance fraud. Charlie was sent briefly to some boot camp in Montana for bad rich kids. He learned to ride horses there.''

This commingling of fluency with detachment fuels McDonell's observations of teenage life, often to amusing effect. Of Jessica, a high school senior who becomes one of White Mike's clients, we learn: ''She hangs around with these three girls all the time. . . . They agree about who is cool and who is not. . . . They agree that they are all sexy, but each more so than the other three.'' They also agree that ''the Hamptons rock'' and that their parents don't, ''even though, like, I tell my mom everything, but not everything everything, you know?'' Of another girl, Sara Ludlow, an object of collective desire in the high school set, McDonell writes: ''In fact, Sara knows she is famous. She likes being famous. She wants to be more famous. Here's how you do it. First you're famous in your grade, then you're famous in your school. Then you're famous in all the schools, and then in the city, or at least the part of the city that matters. And then you've got a career.''

For all the irony McDonell brings to his descriptions of teenage posturing, he maintains a teasing affection for the absurdities of adolescence -- an impressive feat of synthesis for an author who just graduated from high school. Chris, an awkward boy trying desperately to part with his virginity, slides his hand down a girl's pants, causing her to flinch and, in so doing, to sever the tendon in his pinkie. McDonell writes: ''He had no control over the digit; it hung limp as he moved the rest of his fingers. The girl thought it was funny. He told everyone he had gotten his hand stuck in a drawer, but he wound up with a big cast from the complicated hand surgery and lost his confidence.'' The odd fusion of teenage dissipation with brainy New York cultural life also makes for some choice riffs; a character known as Mark Rothko earned this moniker after pushing another child into Mark Rothko's ''Untitled (Number 12)'' during a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum. ''The huge painting came down on the kid, and both he and the painting had to be restored,'' McDonell writes. And when Jessica inhales a new drug called ''twelve,'' for which the novel is named, she likens the thrill she feels to her tingling joy at first reading the Gettysburg Address.

McDONELL'S gifts of observation, empathy and humor coalesce most winningly in the character of White Mike, a boy who yields his subway seat to elderly women and has never smoked or had a drink. Such a person might seem an unlikely candidate for drug dealing, but White Mike's detour from good-boydom has everything to do with his mother's death, a few years earlier, from breast cancer. Now living with his father in a state of grieving estrangement, Mike often recalls his mother, who flickers like a vital, loving shadow at the novel's periphery. One chapter begins: ''White Mike looked at her as she spoke. His mother said that it could be a couple years, but it might be less, and at the end she said she was sorry, and he said, Don't worry, it's not your fault. She said she wasn't going to talk about it anymore, and they were just going to live the best life they could. Did you hear me, Michael? Always live the best life you can.'' White Mike is a fully realized character, full of contradictions and pathos; as the swell of violence one senses rolling in his direction begins to gather force, the reader genuinely fears for him.

''Twelve'' has its problems; while the violent denouement feels appropriate, it is followed by a coda so rushed and flimsy that it isn't clear whether we're even meant to take it seriously. The majority of female characters are mere sexual manipulators, and the irresistible properties of the drug twelve are unpersuasive as anything more than a plot device. But I was impressed by the wit and commitment of this book, by McDonell's ability to write with distance and perspective about a world he's still smack in the midst of. Such qualities will serve him well as a writer of any age.